I absolutely love London and arriving in London felt like reuniting with an old friend.
Even though I’ve only visited London for short periods of time on three different occasions many years ago, it feels like I have a certain familiarity with London. Maybe because it’s featured so much in history lessons, literature, movies and monopoly, but it was a great feeling being back in London, recognising all the buildings and tube station names.
Traveling from Singapore to London
The flight from Singapore to London was an extremely long journe.y I have to hand it to parents who fly from Australia to the UK in one journey, it’s so long to be sitting on plane, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to keep a toddler occupied for that length of time.
We flew out of Singapore at midday but we would have woken up around 7am that morning so we could get to the airport with plenty of time to look around again. Singapore Airport is so amazing efficient, it was no stress at all.
The girls were great on the plane; the inflight entertainment kept everyone occupied, we didn’t need to even get out any of the games or colouring or the iPad. It was the first flight where we have had meals and inflight entertainment included , so we were all excited to just binge watch whatever we wanted to for the next 13 hours. I watched an amazing documentary about Alanis Morreette and a few other cheesy rom-coms and then The Killing of The Flower Moon with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro which was three hours long! And I missed the last 15 minutes because the damn flight was landing and I had to get off, haha!
The food was honestly excellent too, obviously relative to airplane food in general. The only downside of the whole flight was that no one really got an sleep. Rooney slept for about 3 hours and Hallie maybe for an hour or so, but Farley - not at all. Neither did Braino or I. We landed in London at 7pm London time, but that was around 2am Singapore time, so it was a very long day.
One thing we have decided is that airport transfers are 100% worth the money. We had one arranged for when we landed in London (which we booked through booking.com) and he was able to meet us at the arrivals gate and take us straight to our accommodation. Which was an absolute blessing after such a long flight.
Jetlag
I’ve never been to London in the summer months, only in winter and early spring, so it was a bit of an adjustment getting used to the longer daylight hours. We arrived at our accommodation around 10pm and it was still daylight, or just on sunset. Which actually worked out well as we just had showers and went to bed and were able to get a full night sleep and wake up at a usual morning time the next day.
I thought this would help a lot in terms of avoiding jet lag. We did manage to get out and about the following day but it seemed like jet lag really hit on the second day. It was mainly Farley, she never naps, getting her to nap as a baby was such a mission, but she was the one that fell asleep on a train in the middle of the day. I certainly felt tired every night, and slept well for the whole week we were in London.
The accommodation
The accommodation we were staying at was one block back fro Edgeware Road, north of the Edgeware Road Tube Station on the Bakerloo Line (for those of you who may be familiar with London) It was a two bedroom apartment that we booked via booking.com and it was overall ok. The building itself was about 20 floors high, (we were on floor 17) with four apartments on each level. It kind of reminded me of an old disused uni campus that we once shot a short film in during my film school days. It was probably built in the 70’s and felt a bit like a council flat.
Fortunately the interior of the apartment was in better condition, but only just. The bathroom was in need of an update, there wasn’t a plug for the bath and the thing that holds the shower hose onto the wall had broken off so showering was a annoyingly tricky. But at least the water was hot! Little things like that could really get under your skin, but Braino and I have been good about putting things into perspective and focusing on the bigger picture. I’m mean we’re traveling the world for a whole year, a dodgy bathroom is really just a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. And anyway, I kind of feel like that apartment was probably pretty standard for London, in that price range anyway.
Actually, initially we had booked a hotel room in a hotel on Sussex Garden, which was off Edgeware Road, a little closer to Paddington Train station and Hyde Park.
It was actually the same street I stayed on with my family when I was there in 2007 and I remembered the location being fairly central. From memory it would have included breakfast but it was only a hotel room with 4 or 5 beds in it. And after the Sinagpore capsule hotel accommodation and even the small room we had in Tokyo, Braino and I decided to see if if we could find something a little bigger, like a 2 bedroom apartment. And we were fortunate that the original accomodation was refundable and that we could find the new accommodation in a similar area for a similar price.
The kitchen, dinning room and lounge area made such a difference for the week. We were able to buy groceries and cook dinner every night. Obviously the exchange rate to British pounds is a huge thing to factor in, so being able to eat breakfast and dinner at home and even occasional pack a lunch, meant we could keep the budget in check. Also, the kids go a little crazy in restaurants after a long day. I’ve started bringing Uno or a pack of cards out to restaurants just to give them something to do while we’re waiting for our meals.
I’ll share more about what we did during our stay in London in the following post….
